[tor-talk] Does Atlas support looking for bridges?

Karsten Loesing karsten at torproject.org
Sat Apr 20 10:42:14 UTC 2013


On 4/20/13 12:30 PM, Sebastian G. <bastik.tor> wrote:
> Hi Karsten,
> 
> 20.04.2013 11:19, Karsten Loesing:
>> Hi Sebastian,
>>
>> On 4/20/13 11:06 AM, Sebastian G. <bastik.tor> wrote:
> [...]
>>> Does Atlas support looking for bridges and if so how has the search
>>> query to be formated?
>>
>> Atlas does not yet support looking for bridges.  See #6320.
> 
> Glad that I didn't bookmark the ticket. Sad that it doesn't support it.

Yes, but there's hope!

>>> Atlas itself says "Atlas is a web application to discover Tor relays and
>>> bridges." which is true for relays.
>>
>> You're right, it's lying about being able to discover bridges.
> 
> How can Atlas or the website lie on their own? ;) (don't reply to this
> kind of sarcastic question)

:)

>>> "The historical data of the bridges bandwidth usage is available in
>>> graph form." It doesn't work for me.
>>>
>>> First I require knowledge about bridges, and onionoo knows them:
>>> https://onionoo.torproject.org/details?type=bridge
>>
>> See Onionoo's protocol specification for details to query bridge data.
>> Onionoo supports everything that's necessary for Atlas to show bridge
>> information.  It's just not in a human-friendly format.
> 
> Querying Onionoo isn't that user friendly. The summary is understandable
> to me, the bandwidth document is not. Well it was never made for
> users/operators to look at.
> 
>>> Looking for (exact) nickname or hashed fingerprint (or both) returns:
>>> "No Results found! No Tor bridges or relays matched your query :("
>>>
>>> The backend can't handle "nickname" and returns an error.
>>
>> Well, the back-end can handle bridge nicknames.  It's just that Atlas
>> can't make use of returned bridge information yet.
> 
> It can handle nickname, but doesn't like "nickname" (with quotes "").

Oh, true.

>>> Sure Atlas is in beta, but either it is not implemented or I'm doing
>>> something wrong, or both.
>>
>> Having bridge support in Atlas would be awesome!  Want to submit a patch?
> 
> Indeed it would be awesome to have support for bridges. Wanting and
> being able to are to different animals (two different pairs of shoes,
> for the Germans).
> 
> JavaScript and CSS are code, too. There might be the possibility that I
> understand what it does in general, but it appears to be unlikely that I
> understand what it does in detail or that I could reproduce it. It is
> also another step from reproducing something to successfully changing
> something or building something new.
> 
> When I'm providing a patch Atlas might even show the real IP addresses
> of bridges even if Onionoo doesn't have them. ;)

No worries about that in particular.  Onionoo uses data that is publicly
available, which includes sanitized bridge descriptors.

> If I could do that I'd provide patches for various things and review
> code. Remember ticket 6147, the solution looks easy, I wouldn't have
> found that solution. The patch looks like it's going to work, but I
> couldn't tell.
> 
> (I might be repeating my lack of coding skill over and over, sorry for
> me repeating myself.)

Sorry for trying again and again and again. :)  At some point, you'll
say "what the hack, maybe coding is not magic at all, it's a weekend,
the weather isn't particularly good, let me just try this!"

> Out of curiosity what kind of code (JS, CSS, Python) would need to be
> changed? This information might make it easier for others reading this
> thread to say "Oh, I can write $language and do what has to be done."

Just JavaScript, no CSS, no Python.  Here's the repo:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/atlas.git

Happy to review patches! :)

Best,
Karsten


>> Thanks,
>> Karsten
> Thank you for your reply. Thank you in advance for the second reply.
> 
> I'm not going to reply unless there's something requiring me to.
> 
> Best,
> Sebastian
> 



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